Wednesday, October 01, 2014

'Bakashot ' are back!

The Sephardi tradition of Bakashot, singing prayers asking for redemption, is being revived by the pious children of Moroccan Jews now living in North America. Fascinating article in the Tampa Jewish Press:

NEW YORK – The group of young Jewish professionals had gathered to
participate in the revival of a Sephardic tradition hearkening back to
the days of their grandparents and great-grandparents.

Arriving at an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, they greeted
each other in French and settled in around a dining table laid out with
snacks and bottles of arak.

They had come to listen to the chanting of bakashot, a class of
traditional Sephardic liturgical poems praising and petitioning God. The
singing of bakashot, which literally means “requests,” was once common
practice among Sephardic Jews across the Middle East and North Africa,
but it has waned in many communities over the past two generations.

Sung to classical Sephardic musical modes, bakashot were
traditionally performed in synagogues during the pre-dawn hours before
Sabbath morning services in the months between Sukkot and Passover.

“Ninety percent of the classic tunes sung in the synagogue are based
on bakashot,” said Mony Abergel, who grew up in Casablanca, Morocco.
“Every Moroccan, even if he does not know the bakashot, knows the
tunes.”
Abergel was one of the gathering’s four singers, men in their mid-20s
to early 30s from Moroccan Jewish families who meet every week to learn
and rehearse bakashot.

The men sang in unison, breaking out occasionally into solos. One of
them, the group’s founder Sacha Ouazana, also played a drum called a
darbouka. The music was of a piece with classic Sephardic liturgical
chanting, but with a supplicatory yet insistent quality.

Most of those at the gathering were members of the West Side
Sephardic Synagogue. The synagogue is the spiritual home for a growing
community of young Jews of North African heritage, many of whom grew up
in France and have immigrated to New York over the past decade. Ouazana,
for example, grew up outside Paris and now serves as the synagogue’s
cantor.

Ouazana said he began his cantorial training at the age of 5 but
discovered bakashot only when he went to study in the Alsatian city of
Strasbourg in his late teens. Before starting the bakashot group in
2011, he spent 10 years gathering and studying materials.

“My goal was first to learn the bakashot and then to perpetuate this tradition, especially in the U.S.,” Ouazana said.

Bakashot draw heavily on Hebrew piyutim – or Jewish liturgical poems –
from the Spanish Golden Age. Popular wisdom has it that the bakashot
tradition originated then, but many scholars disagree.

Ethnomusicologist and musician Samuel Thomas said that the
tradition’s real roots lie in the kabbalism of 16th- and 17th-century
Safed in Israel. The works of the kabbalistic poet Israel Najara, who
figured prominently during that period, are also heavily represented
among the bakashot.

“It basically comes from the Lurianic kabbalist tradition that looks
to inspire a mystical brotherhood and tries to force the hand of God
through mystical practice,” said Thomas, a scholar of Sephardic musical
traditions who composes new settings for piyutim for his musical
ensemble Asefa. “A major theme of the bakashot is asking for redemption.
They are indelibly marked by the tragedy of the Spanish expulsion – and
by the urgency that ‘this has got to be the time’ of redemption.”

The tradition spread throughout the Sephardic world with each
community developing its own repertoire over the ensuing centuries.
Among Syrian Jews, for example, there is a set group of 66 bakashot that
are recited completely or in part each week. In the Moroccan tradition,
by contrast, the bakashot change from Sabbath to Sabbath based on the
weekly Torah portion. The communities with the most codified traditions,
said Thomas, were in Morocco, Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Jerusalem.

Both Ouazana and Abergel emphasized the difficulty of learning bakashot.
“Bakashot are very complex, and if you don’t have someone to teach you, they are very difficult to transmit,” Abergel said.

The general decline in religious observance during the 20th century
and the great disruption to Sephardic communities that was brought about
when they left homelands in which they had been rooted for centuries
were also contributing factors to the decline in the practice.

3 comments:

I just meant to use the Toronto clip by way of illustrating what a bakasha sounds like as there was nothing on the net pertaining to this New York story. Yes, Toronto is in Canada and I have changed the wording to North America.

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